Google's Shakeup: To SEO or Not to SEO

Many folks in the SEO circles as well as individual website owners noticed a lot of changes to Google's ranking recently. There talks about the "end of SEO" and how Google essentially put out of business a lot of SEO companies and SEO tool providers. I hear these talks even in the educated Ottawa SEO community.

Well, there are changes for sure! I don't think there is a reason to worry about the "end of SEO" because it is like saying "the end of search". Website owners will always need to optimize their websites for search engines so there will always be SEO work that has to be done on a website. The question is how "secretive" this work can continue to be.

There are many SEO tools that uninformed website owners sign up for and pay $50-90 per month. Well, most SEOs know that you can get the same results free of charge - just need to know where to look. And there were always 4-5 different places where you would go and run your reports.

Well, now, Google Chrome has come up with a web store - and it has everything your soul can desire for SEO and it is all in one place. Hip Hip Hurray!  But of course, those "secretive" SEO tools will probably go our of business, unless they lower their prices significantly or offer something of real value.

We noticed that on-page content matters much more. Google loves words. Lots of them. And it now pays more attention to the word order. In the past, "website design Ottawa" or "Ottawa website design" were almost interchangeable, but not now. Now you have to optimize your copy individually for each.

We also noticed that links from websites and blogs and forums specialized in your area of expertise give very fast results.

Oh well, all this is not new to us, and as a result, not much has changed for us. Our ratings did change, but slightly, we did not experience a serious shake-down.

SEO has been and still remains the three things: content (lots of it), keywords stuffed everywhere, and quality back links from other websites in your field.

Best Quality Links

Everyone knows that SEO entails link building. In fact, link building is the most important part of SEO. But what kind of links? Any links, from any website?

Well, the answer is any link is good to have but links from specialized reputable websites in the field of your desired keywords is what will affect your SEO in the most noticeable way.

Define "related" and "reputable" websites.

"Rebutable" has nothing to do with PR. In fact, a link from a website with PR0 can be quite valuable if this website is specialized in your area of expertise (i.e. in the area of expertise covered by your desired keyword).

"Related" is best understood in terms of specific keywords AND in terms of general specialization of a website. Again, websites specialized in your area of expertise are a much better link material than general websites.

Plus, ideally you'd want to have a link from a page that has a title containing the same keywords that your website is about and include the same keywords as an anchor text of the link that leads to your website.

If all your links come from these type of websites and these type of pages on those websites then you can only have a few links from each, with the total of 200 or so links, and you will be very high on Google, provided your content is unique and is well saturated with the same keywords.

If you have any questions, contact me via my webiste design Ottawa website or via my SEO Ottawa website. We revently launched a new website design ottawa 4u site, check it out and let us know what you think.

SEO Tart is Here!

My SEO Ottawa website is getting old, but I have an emotional attachment to it, so I don't want to redesign or change it. Instead, I created a new search engine optimization site - SEO Tart.

I wanted to free myself from the burden of the business style presentation and have a fun site with tons of useful SEO information.

I still maintain that SEO is easy and fun and anyone can learn how to do it well within a few hours. The level of SEO expertise becomes apparent with numbers: how many sites were optimized, for how many keywords, for what level of competition - things like that.

Every now and then I come across nice SEO articles and even SEO books with a lot of good SEO information, but after a couple of minutes of reading it I can tell that the author has very little hands-on SEO experience.

You can also find me via my website design Ottawa site.

CMS for SEO and Web Design

Why Not Use Proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS)
This week I had a meeting with a business owner here in Ottawa who was looking for order SEO for his website. He told me that they are using a proprietary content management system for his website that was provided to him by his web design firm. "Oh, no", I said to myself.

A web content management system (CMS) is a must for any website nowadays. Not having it is like not using email, well, almost. But proprietary CMS would be analogous to buying pipes for your house that were manufactured by your developer who followed their own specifications. So if you want to replace or fix some portion of the pipes you can't just go to Canadian Tire and buy it, you have to go back to your developer. Besides, if you ever want to add some a bathroom or powder room, you will also have to ask your developer to design them all for you FROM SCRATCH - instead of going and buying those pieces ready-made and installing them. This is exactly what you will be doing if you sign up for a proprietary CMS instead of open-source CMS.

But don't listen to me, do your own research. Simply Google "open source content management systems" advantages and disadvantages. Pluses and minuses.  Here is a list of open source web CMS. Focus on the ones based on PHP.

The three most popular open source CMSs based on PHP are Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. I prefer Joomla because it is much more flexible and scalable than Wordpress and much easier to use then Drupal. Security and load time are virtually identical for all three of these CMSs.

Doing SEO with Joomla or other reputable open-source CMS is much faster. The main reason: there are dozens of plugins and components developed in the last 12 years that make SEO faster. Those plugins and components (i.e. extensions) will not be available to you if you are using a proprietary CMS, so your SEO will need to be done page-by-page by hand.

I had another conversation recently where a company has just built a new website - without any CMS! Using HTML, can you imagine? This was a 800% longer and more expensive project than it needed to be. The reason why they decided not to use Joomla? Someone told them it is not good. Joomla is the most popular CMS on the planet. Does this fact not deserve a little research? How can you rely on one person's opinion without checking it out for yourself? I find it hard to understand. Oh, well, this company paid a huge price tag for this decision. What's most surprising is that the company is in the high-tech field, you'd expect them to be more savvy than an average non-technological business, right? Not so. It is not the first time I encounter this. My coffee business and landscaping clients end up being more clever in web site decisions than many of my high tech clients. Even software development companies - go figure!

I even wrote an article explaining why open-source software is often better than commercial software. Take 10 min to read it and you will understand that using a proprietary CMS would be a very costly mistake.

If you have questions or need help, do not hesitate to contact me via my SEO Ottawa website or Joomla web design website.

Link Building for Top SEO

It has been noted that the anchor text embedded in the hyperlinks adds a lot of SEO value - and it still holds true. It seems now more than ever.

We recently launched Joomla Bliss, our website design Ottawa shop, and we are now doing directory registrations for it. There aren't too many Canadian directories!  And there aren't too many for web design and Internet Marketing.

In my view directory links have a higher impact on your SEO than links from blogs and forums. With directory registrations the focus should be on relevant directories. One link from a relevant directory is worth five general ones. What is important is directory listings need to be indexable, i.e. easily accessible to search engines. And above all, links from websites with high Page Rank (PR) is what matters the most nowadays. Any website with a PR of 5 and above is a great catch. It is not easy to find such igh PR sites which would not have a "nofollow" tag set up for their outgoing links.

So your best choice for top SEO: relevant directories with PR of 5+ and without 'nofollow' tags. And if you can find a category for your geographical target - bonus!

Oh, and should you worry about paying for your links? Google says yes, yes, and yes again. Google talk so mcuh about the danger of paid links that it should make anyone suspicious (why do you need to talk? just get paid links penalties implemented and it won't take a long time for the SEO and web design communit to notice, in fact, those folks are so savvy, it won't take more than a week - and you won't need to talk about those terrible awful paid links.

In my view, paid links work fine, especially directory links. And how would search engines know you paid for your link anyway? Besides, directories need to be maintained, so charging webmasters a fee for the listing is legitimate business if you run a huge directory website.

Then Google is pushing this "nofollow" business. Again, why would you need that if your spiders can distinguish between paid and non-paid links, eh? I suspect, along with some other SEOs, that those nofollow links still count.

I posted a few comments on two websites related to web design with PR8 and PR9, and within a couple of days, my site jumped 30 links up! Google denies that nofollow links matter, of course, but I am not the only one who noticed that they do.

Try it for yourself and you'll see. Just make sure not to do anything else in the meantime, i.e. do not optimize your site, do not register in directories or build any other links. Give yourself a few days, then post a comment on a related website with PR8 or PR9 with a link back to your website (include your keywords in the anchor text). Then wait another few days - and check the results. And then come back and let me know, the more we know about it the better it is for all of us. There is no other way to find out but trying it with different sites, Google is not going to reveal its secrets anytime soon.

And if you need help with link building, contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.